Eurogamer Retro: Armed & Dangerous

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How funny was Armed & Dangerous? Yes, yes it absolutely had the Land Shark Gun, and no one can dispute its magnificence, but what about the rest of the game? I took a look at the 2003 game for Eurogamer, and then wrote words about it in the correct order. Some were:

“The reception is all down to context. You know when a golfer makes a funny mime to the crowd when someone’s phone rings, and everyone falls about laughing? Context. It’s not funny. It’s just unexpected. Put that golfer on stage at an open mic comedy night and his hilarity would be put into cruel perspective. It’s just not okay, not after 3000 years of games being around, for something just not being completely humourless to be good enough. And it’s not that A&D is unfunny – not at all. It’s occasionally wry, often silly. But just not “hilarious”.”

I remember swedish PC Gamer had an aspiring reviewer who bent over backwards to praise the game for it’s humour while trying to cover up that it gameplay-wise was a shit game. He ended the review saying something like “The humour ROCKS!” and giving it 50-60%.

What I liked was that, on starting the game and running forwards looking for enemies, the very first thing you come across are some penguins. Just harmless penguins, sitting on a cliff, looking at the sea. I shot them, and they just sort of flumped over bathetically.

A comment on life’n’stuff, or the existential tragedy of a gameworld that only allows interaction through violence, or a droll introduction to the new fangled ‘rag-doll’ physics the PR was boasting of?

Judging by the bum based humour of much of the rest of the game, probably not.

Well, the eyeless cloud-forms of Nimbus Octen find farting to be the highest form of wit, robots have been observed giggling for hours while trying to express irrational numbers as fractions but, yes, gays are dangerous and broken creatures who have no sense of humuor.

I remember spending quite a lot of time with this game. Don’t know how, but I got in the mood and enjoyed it a lot, despite hard difficulty later on. When I tried to replay it some years later, I couldn’t get back in, somehow.

Funny that; I played Armed & Dangerous in 2006 when I picked it up from a bargain bin after hearing how funny it was for a few years, and my reaction basically the same as you, John. The writing has a few funny bits, but not nearly enough to make the thing funny as a whole, and the game itself is pretty mediocre.

I enjoyed Armed & Dangerous but I’m in no hurry to play it again. Actually no, I am, but in the firm knowledge that its not a fantastic game. There must be something in that.

Giants is one of my favourite things, in any media. Armed & Dangerous didn’t come close to topping it, but its commercial failure is a real shame as Planet Moon haven’t bothered attempting anything similar since.

In my magic what-if world of joy there is a tradition of releasing re-mixed versions of old games that compress all the gameplay ideas into about 2 hours. Chugging through older games is perfect Sunday morning stuff, but trudging through all the repetition and filler games included to convince gamers they were getting their money’s worth is not so much fun at all.

I got this on sale a few years ago and had a good ol’ laugh with it. The Land Shark Gun made me belly laugh but eventually I tired of it. I’ve never completed it and would like to go back and finish it off but it was rather samey very quickly.

That said, what games DO make us all laugh consistently? I think top of my list is Psychonauts, I love that game, mouse crushingly frustrating though some levels were. Before that was Goblins, way back when and then good ol’ Worms. I feel I should tip my hat to Day of the Tentacle too but I never got round to getting that.

I’ve never heard of this game, bizarrely, or maybe just completely forgotten about ever hearing of it, so I couldn’t really find anything interesting in the retrospective. Sometimes they’re good even if you don’t know the game, but I think this one required a lot of pre-knowledge.

As far as the humour goes, Planet Moon really set the bar incredibly high with Giants, which meant that Armed & Dangerous had some mighty big boots to fill.

Unfortunately the writing in A&D was not only significantly less funny than that of Giants, but the cutscenes were also much much longer, which only exacerbated the issue. It’s not that it was completely devoid of any genuine humour — it definitely had its moments — but it was simply a comparative let-down to what they had previously produced; and whereas Giants handily covered its gameplay deficiencies with laugh-out-loud comedy, A&D’s weaker laughs provided no such ability.

Gameplay in A&D was a mixed bag, but definitely enjoyable on the whole. It was a game where you absolutely needed to go nuts with the fabulous arsenal, because the basic guns really could do everything. If you tried to hang on to your ammo until you ‘needed’ it, you would simply miss most of the fun.

I enjoyed A&D much more once I cut loose a bit, and appreciated it for what it was (and in fact I have played it through multiple times, which is a good indication that there is plenty of enjoyment to be had), but I’ll always be a little bit sad that Giants never quite got the follow-up that we dreamed about.

I played about three quarters of the way through this before getting distracted and moving on to something else. I feel a bit guilt about it now. I wonder if it is too late for me to re-install and try to complete?

I remember noticing the anti-French stuff at the time though and thinking it was a bit over the top. Did the game co-incide with the US invasion of Iraq or some other USA – France bone of contention.

I agree that Star Wars quotes aren’t jokes in of themselves. One of the reasons Startopia was poisoned in my mind forever – I’d had a wonderful experience, right until the closing cutscene rolled, and BAM instant unfunny. Like getting to the bottom of a delicious icecream and finding a turd.

Yes, A&D was a lot of fun and still very funny. In fact I found it funnier than Giants, which was also a very fun game. A&D wasn’t anti-French at all. It just poked fun at them, along with many other as well.
I wish there was more writing like this in games.

As soon as I saw “Armed and Dangerous” in the title, I thought “Ah, that game that was supposed to be super funny but really wasn’t”. I bought it with high expectations after constantly reading how “hilarious” it was.

I thought the weapons were silly and cool, and the occasional cutscene was a bit funny, but it wasn’t anywhere near the laff riot everyone seemed to be talking about, so I recall it mostly as a disappointment.

Actually, I remember one problem with Giants was that the Kabuto sections lacked cutscenes (and the narrative was pretty rushed and confused by then, too) so you were in the odd situation where the bits of the game where you were playing a big stompy monster were some of the weakest.

I forget how I got it, but I really liked (and still like) A&D. The humor isn’t groundbreaking but it’s often silly, and not enough games have intentional silliness in them. And the jetpack is splendid – why more people haven’t ripped it off is beyond me. Also landshark gun, of course.

“Q, can you toss me?”
“WOT”
“Can you toss me over” (referring to a big wall)
“Well I can certainly try”

Personally I enjoyed the game to its conclusion. There were a couple of laugh out loud moments, but generally it’s just amusing.

The gameplay is pretty much generic third person shooterness with a land shark gun and some turret sequences that saw you take on armies of such a size that they wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Total War game.

All of which left it with a sense of being an average game that had been given a substantial and humorous makeover, but one that wasn’t enough to cover its genericness entirely.

No-one lives forever 1 and 2 were funnier games, I remember laughing out loud at the absurd chats you could listen in on. However, Giants Citizen Kabuto was close, did the devs try too hard for armed and dangerous? The ‘funny’ games subgenre also seemed to die in the early noughties – whatever happened?

Sadly Planet Moon never again reached the heights of the first MDK, thought this certainly came pretty close at times gameplay-wise. It was far from perfect, and unfortunately not very funny at all, but personally I found this a far better follow-up to MDK than the (dire) official sequel.

One day I’ll disagree with John on one of these retrospectives, then the honeymoon will be well and truly over and he and I will have to have words!

Both Armed and dangerous and Giants were both amusing at times but hardly hilarious. In my mind Giants had the more inventive gameplay ideas but I probably found Armed and Dangerous more fun. Plus it did have the Land Shark gun.